Abstract
Drawing inspiration from sleight-of-hand magic tricks, we developed an experimental paradigm to investigate whether magicians’ misdirection techniques could be used to induce the misperception of “phantom” objects. While previous experiments investigating sleight-of-hand magic tricks have focused on creating false assumptions about the movement of an object in a scene, our experiment investigated creating false assumptions about the presence of an object in a scene. Participants watched a sequence of silent videos depicting a magician performing with a single object. Following each video, participants were asked to write a description of the events in the video. In the final video, participants watched the Phantom Vanish Magic Trick, a novel magic trick developed for this experiment, in which the magician pantomimed the actions of presenting an object and then making it magically disappear. No object was presented during the final video. The silent videos precluded the use of false verbal suggestions, and participants were not asked leading questions about the objects. Nevertheless, 32% of participants reported having visual impressions of non-existent objects. These findings support an inferential model of perception, wherein top-down expectations can be manipulated by the magician to generate vivid illusory experiences, even in the absence of corresponding bottom-up information.
Highlights
The performance of magic is based on practical and theoretical knowledge of psychology
Empirical investigations of magic played a critical role in the establishment of Experimental Psychology as a scientific discipline (e.g., Wundt, 1879; see Figure 1), and early psychologists have written about the psychology of magic tricks (Jastrow, 1888, 1896; Dessoir, 1893; Binet, 1896; Triplett, 1900; see Lamont, 2010; Thomas et al, 2016)
Question 1 (Q1) of the Spectators’ Experience Questionnaire was presented immediately after each individual video of the five-video sequence, and the participants were asked: “Please write a description of what was shown in the video
Summary
The performance of magic is based on practical and theoretical knowledge of psychology (see Gregory, 1982; Kuhn et al, 2008; Macknik et al, 2008; Rensink and Kuhn, 2015). The Phantom Vanish Trick represents a novel contribution to the perception literature in that it has the potential to demonstrate that a spectator’s top-down expectations can lead them to perceive illusory objects where none have been presented This is an extension of previous experiments that have shown that people may falsely infer the illusory motion of an object. Based on informal observations of professional magic trick performances, as well as previous studies of sleight-of-hand magic tricks and pantomimes (e.g., Kuhn and Land, 2006; Phillips et al, 2015), we predicted that some participants who watched the video of the Phantom Vanish Trick would report the presence of a non-existent object, and that there were three possible outcomes. The third possible outcome was that some participants would fail to experience the PVI, and they would provide a veridical report of the events shown in the video
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